Applebaum: Ukraine needs MORE nationalism, not less

Yes, exactly!  Nationalism -- called patriotism in most contexts -- is necessary for any country to form its own identity and stay together.

Nationalism is not a scary word by itself; and it is certainly not synonymous with "fascism," "jingoism" or "xenophobia," as Russian media, politicians and academics would have us believe.

Concludes Anne Applebaum [emphasis mine]:

Thus do the tiny group of nationalists in Ukraine, whom perhaps we can now agree to call patriots, represent the country’s only hope of escaping apathy, rapacious corruption, and, eventually, dismemberment.

And this should be no surprise: In the nineteenth century, no sensible freedom fighter would have imagined it possible to create a modern state, let alone a democracy, without some kind of nationalist movement behind it. Only people who feel some kind of allegiance to their society—people who celebrate their national language, literature, and history, people who sing national songs and repeat national legends—are going to work on that society’s behalf. This goes for Russians, too, though tragically they insist on looking to their imperial traditions as a source of national pride, instead of to their liberal leaders in the early twentieth century or to their outstanding Soviet-era dissidents, the founders of the modern human rights movement.

In the West, we know this, but lately, we rarely admit it. That’s in part because we remember very well the disasters that ethnic nationalism, cloaked as fascism or sometimes as communism, brought in the twentieth century. Europeans in particular now go out of their way to downplay national differences, which is usually good. Territorial disputes in Europe have dissolved, since open borders make it simply less important whether Alsace is French or German. But European democracy would fail if European politicians did not also appeal to patriotism, did not take national interests into account, and did not address themselves to the special problems of their particular nations, too.

In the United States, we dislike the word “nationalism” and so, hypocritically, we call it other things: “American exceptionalism,” for example, or a “belief in American greatness.” We also argue about it as if it were something rational—Mitt Romney wrote a book that put forth the “case for American greatness”—rather than acknowledging that nationalism is fundamentally emotional. In truth, you can’t really make “the case” for nationalism; you can only inculcate it, teach it to children, cultivate it at public events. If you do so, nationalism can in turn inspire you so that you try to improve your country, to help it live up to the image you want it to have. Among other things, that thought inspired the creation of this magazine 100 years ago.

Ukrainians need more of this kind of inspiration, not less—moments like last New Year’s Eve, when more than 100,000 Ukrainians sang the national anthem at midnight on the Maidan. They need more occasions when they can shout, “Slava Ukraini—Heroyam Slava”—“Glory to Ukraine, Glory to its Heroes,” which was, yes, the slogan of the controversial Ukrainian Revolutionary Army in the 1940s, but has been adopted to a new context. And then of course they need to translate that emotion into laws, institutions, a decent court system, and police training academies. If they don’t, then their country will once again cease to exist.

Incidentally, the leader of Ukraine's most nationalist party, Svoboda, recently wrote an op-ed saying much the same thing: that given Ukraine's history and geography, nationalism is much more about national defense and preventing any future dismemberment of the Ukrainian state by outside powers. See: "Oleh Tiahnybok: Rescue nationalism from 'Pandora's box'."

Nationalism Is Exactly What Ukraine Needs

By Anne Applebaum

May 12, 2014 | New Republic

URL: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117505/ukraines-only-hope-nationalism

Stop forcing Ukraine into a 'West vs. Russia' narrative?

I have a lot of sympathy with where writer Oliver Bullough is headed here.  Indeed, the Euro-Maidan movement started in 2013 as an internal struggle against endemic corruption, lies and bad governance, personified by President Yanukovych's regime and his ruling Party of Regions, whose sole mission, sans anything resembling an ideology, was to consolidate power from the presidency down to the level of every village in Ukraine.

Writes Bullough:

This is what the revolution is about: Ukrainians trying to wrest control of their country from the oligarchs of Donetsk, Dnepropetrovsk and elsewhere who – with help from east and west – have robbed them for 23 years. The left should be cheering them on.

The east against west story does have one beneficiary: the Kremlin. In Ukraine Moscow is trying to preserve a crooked regime against the wishes of Ukrainians who want to live with dignity, because the old ways made it money. It also fears a united and stable Ukraine would join Nato. That's why Russia is sheltering Yanukovych, and threatening not to recognise the elections on 25 May. Russia is deploying its propaganda apparatus to present this as an ideological struggle rather than a mercenary one. RT, the channel formerly known as Russia Today, addresses the outside world, while state television channels bombard Russian-speakers with denunciations of the "fascists" in Kiev.

But let's not forget that Yanukovych was always "Putin's man" in Ukraine, starting in 2004 when Putin bankrolled Yanukovych's presidential campaign and Putin spoke out against the Orange Revolution.  And Yanukovych's "power vertical" was a direct emulation of Putin's regime in Russia.

Secondly, the Ukraine conflict quite openly ceased being an internal Ukrainian struggle the moment Russian troops left their Crimean bases in February 2014 and took over the parliament of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea in southern Ukraine.  

Thirdly, now less openly but still quite actively, Russia is supporting, arming and coordinating the actions of pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine (aka Donbass).

Having said that, I believe, as Bullough is trying to say, that internal corruption and bad governance are still at the heart of this crisis.  If Ukraine's new government can truly tackle corruption, then they will have addressed the main grievance of most of Ukraine's population, and win a respect and legitimacy that no government has enjoyed since Ukraine's independence. 

(The language issue is a red herring; people in Kyiv and Lviv speak Russian freely everyday without a thought of suffering persecution; this is just a Russian-inspired media lie.)

However, if the new government cannot manage to make Ukraine less corrupt, or says one thing and does another, then it risks the wrath of a second "Euro-Maidan"... but one that could be much more violent and chaotic, and set off a true civil war.... 

Hopefully Ukraine's self-serving and often puerile politicians understand what's at stake, and will do what's right and necessary to pull the country back from the brink of dissolution!  

Stop forcing Ukraine into a narrative of Moscow versus Washington

By Oliver Bullough

May 19, 2014 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3pc4k

Ex-CIA chief: Russian action in Ukraine 'is a classic covert operation'

The Secret Players In The Russia-Ukraine Game  

By Lorena O'Neil

May 20, 2014 | NPR

Keeping up with the battle in Ukraine? Then you must know of a man named Ramzan Kadyrov. No? Well, that's because he's the Instagram dictator staying in the background, behind the curtain, asking people to pay no mind to the Chechen military fighters he might be ordering over to fight for Russia.

Ramzan Kadyrov is the president of Chechnya, a Russian republic situated in the North Caucasus region. Multiple reports from Russia, Chechnya and Ukraine suggest that there is Chechen military involvement in the eastern part of Ukraine, fighting on the pro-Russia side. While the number of Chechens in Ukraine is hard to gauge and their existence difficult to prove, even a small number could have a deep significance.

To understand why this is important, one must first understand how Russia (and many of its supporters) plays ball. In a word? Subversively.

"What's going on with Ukraine is a classic covert operation," says OZY contributor and former deputy director of the CIA John McLaughlin. "The Russians probably won't have to go in militarily with special forces because they are gradually stirring it up, co-opting it." Multiple Russian experts assume that what we see on television from Ukraine has been influenced by Vladimir Putin's intervention.

"Everyone assumes this is not spontaneously generated by someone who woke up and said, 'Hey, I'd like to be a part of Russia,' " says McLaughlin. "They are doing this very indirectly. Involving the Chechens in that would be also kind of classic, to the extent that you can confuse the adversary." He explains that confusion makes it harder for those who oppose Russia to know what to do next, which is ultimately the aim of covert actions.

There are a host of reasons why Chechens in Ukraine could add confusion. It would mean introducing fighters of a different nationality with motives that seem to clash with Russia's. Chechnya itself fought a separatist war against Russia in 1994-1996, briefly winning until it lost a second war in 1999-2000.

The wars turned into an Islamic insurgency in response to the Kremlin's actions, geographically and politically. Kadyrov and his father, both Muslim, fought against Russia in the first war, but changed sides in the second. Given this recent history, it seems like many Chechens would be sympathetic to those fighting against Russia in Ukraine, and not willing to take up arms on behalf of Russia.

So what would motivate Chechens to fight for Russia?

"Kadyrov is a man who has survived by taking positions that are more pro-Russia than Russia," says Paul Goble, a longtime specialist on ethnic and religious issues in the post-Soviet world. He says the Chechen Republic is vastly more Islamic today than it ever was before, and Putin looks the other way because Kadyrov constantly expresses his undying love for Russia.

Additionally, deploying fighters works to Chechnya's advantage because it gives them military experience in the field, something the Russian government denies them by hesitating to draft North Caucasians in big numbers, Chechens in particular. The government is worried that if it trains Chechens to use its weapons, they may turn around and use their training against Russia.

Chechen forces in the Ukraine can also serve as an implied threat to Russia itself, proving [to Putin - J] how many able-bodied men Kadyrov has at his beck and call. "I find it a fascinating play by Kadyrov, a very evil man who is not stupid," says Goble.

Goble points out that it may be hard for observers to distinguish Chechen forces in the eastern regions of Ukraine from the Crimean Tatars, since both groups are Muslim. "They look similar. They could do something, and the Crimean Tatars could be blamed," says Goble. "Then there'd be more support for tough measures against the Tatars because they [would be seen as] dangerous Muslims, like the Chechens."

The introduction of foreign fighters would eerily resemble the events leading to the escalation of the ongoing Syrian civil war.

The Tatars were deported from their homeland of Crimea by Stalin in 1944, but have returned en masse since 1989. They make up about 12.1 percent of the Crimean population and have been consistent allies of the Ukrainian government against Russia. Sunday marked the 70th anniversary of their mass expulsion, and thousands gathered in commemoration.

Adding Chechens to the mix could intensify instability yet have minimal consequences for Russia. Goble explains that Chechens have a reputation for being brutal fighters. Kadyrov himself has been suspected of horrific human rights abuses and runs an intensely thuggish regime. (He tries to counterbalance this reputation with pictures of fluffy kittens on Instagram.) However,Moscow could easily deny any responsibility for actions taken by Chechens, as nothing has been officially ordered by Putin.

In fact, Kadyrov himself is denying official Chechen military involvement. When acting Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said Chechens were fighting alongside pro-Russian rebels in Slovyansk, a town in east Ukraine, Kadyrov took to his Instagram to call this allegation "absurd." As Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Liz Fuller points out, Kadyrov was careful to say "Chechen battalions" are not currently deployed in Ukraine, which does not really touch on the issue of informal military units.

Right now there is no definitive proof that Chechens are in Ukraine, just hearsay and YouTube videos. Kavkazcenter, the official website of the North Caucasus Islamic insurgency, posted a letter from a man who claims he was sent to Crimea and then to Slovyansk as part of a Chechen security force. Reuters spoke with a soldier who says he went to Crimea ahead of its voter referendum.

Recruitment centers in Grozny were reportedly asking for volunteer soldiers to fight in Ukraine, but the offices suddenly closed after stories about them were published. A Chechen student in Grozny alleges, via Russian blogger Oleg Leusenko, that residents were reluctant to volunteer, and recruiters called those people cowards and violently beat a man who refused to sign up.

Of course, this is not the world according to Kadyrov. "There are tens of thousands of volunteers in Chechnya who are ready to help those who are being abused by fascistic thugs, whose blood is being shed by the unlawful government of Kiev," writes Kadyrov, who can't resist a not-at-all-veiled threat even in a denial. "And if the Chechens really go to Slavyansk and other cities, you will see how people like Avakov flee from there, and will not stop even at the Western border of Ukraine."

Translation: We're not there — but if we were, you would know because you would be fleeing in terror. How thoughtful of the totally trustworthy Kadyrov to provide such ... reassurance.

Obama's strategy against Putin worked as planned?

(HT: NK). Below is an interesting take on Russia's conflict in Ukraine; it's not one you see often.

My biggest criticism of Fisher's analysis is that he may be counting his chickens about avoiding war in Ukraine.  Let's see how the May 25 presidential elections go -- and if they go at all in eastern Ukraine. Then comes Russia's reaction.  If Russia calls those elections illegitimate, and eastern separatists follow Putin's lead, then next could come civil war and/or partition of Ukraine.

My secondary criticism is that Putin continues to arm, fund and coordinate the separatists, mixing in with them Russian mercenaries and army and SBU officers. So to say that Putin is "losing control" of the separatists is a stretch; in fact, this seems to be yet another Kremlin lie that Putin would like us to believe. 

Let Putin cut off all aid to the separatists and then see how far they get without him!

Obama's strategy of letting Putin hang himself is working

By Max Fisher

May 16, 2014 | Vox

Let me be the first to admit it: President Obama's strategy for handling Russia and its incursions into Ukraine had seemed to me, as it did to many others, pretty unlikely to succeed.

Obama dismissed Russia as a "regional power" acting "out of weakness," but it was the US that looked weak: it could only cobble together some targeted sanctions that, while tough, appeared to do nothing to stop Russia's meddling in eastern Ukraine. He needed Europe's support for broader economic sanctions that would actually hurt the Russian economy and he didn't get it. Obama implicitly abandoned Crimea, giving no sign that he thought that, weeks after Russia invaded and annexed the territory, it might ever be returned to Ukraine. The official US position has been to threaten broader sanctions that seem unlikely to get the European support necessary to make them hurt, while arguing that Russia's actions will be so self-defeating that the problem would just sort itself out.

It sounded silly, a shrug of a policy. And maybe it even was. But it also turns out to be working surprisingly well. Russian President Vladimir Putin has over-reached in Ukraine, creating problems for himself so bad that they may force him down as or more effectively than plausible American actions alone might have (although they helped). Putin is hanging himself by his own rope.

This has been so effective, and has apparently taken Putin by such surprise, that after weeks of looking like he could roll into eastern Ukraine unchallenged, he's backing down all on his own. Official Russian rhetoric, after weeks of not-so-subtle threats of invading eastern Ukraine, is backing down. Putin suddenly looks like he will support Ukraine's upcoming presidential election, rather than oppose it, although it will likely install a pro-European president. European and American negotiators say the tone in meetings has eased from slinging accusations to working toward a peaceful resolution.

Most of this is economic. Russia's self-imposed economic problems started pretty quickly after its annexation of Crimea in March and have kept up. Whether or not American or European governments sanction Russia's broader economy, the global investment community has a mind of its own, and they seem to have decided that Russia's behavior has made it a risky place to put money. So risky that they're pulling more money out.

A lot of that may have come from the targeted sanctions that Obama pushed for against individual Russian leaders and oligarchs. Those targeted sanctions did not themselves do much damage to the Russian economy. But, along with Russia's erratic behavior in Ukraine and the lack of clarity as to whether Europe and the US could impose broader sanctions, it appears to have been enough to scare off global investors — the big, faceless, placeless mass of people and banks who have done tremendous damage to Putin's Russia, nudged along by the US and by Putin himself.

Here are three charts, from Forbes' Mark Adomanis, a specialist on Russia's economic issues, showing how Russia's aggression in Ukraine has already started to hurt its economy.

Russia's stock exchange, the Moscow Exchange or MICEX, has shown a severe overall decline:

Moscow Exchange performance

Here's the stock of Sberbank, Russia's largest bank, the performance of which Adomanis says "been popularly used as rough barometer for the overall health of the Russian equity market":

Sberbank stock price

And here's the Russian ruble against the US dollar; the higher the line, the cheaper Russia's currency, and the more expensive it becomes for Russia to import stuff from abroad:

Exchange rate between the ruble and the dollar

From Obama's perspective, the beautiful thing about this is that the US doesn't have to take any big risks to punish Russia for its aggression, because Russia is being punished by the impersonal forces of the global economy (this has the added benefit of not giving Putin a propaganda tool, which US sanctions would do). Maybe even better is the fact that Putin can't cleverly negotiate his way out of these effects or try to game the system, and he now knows this will happen if he tries something like the Crimea annexation again.

It's like someone built one of those electric shock fences around Russia's borders; Putin can cross them again, but he knows he'll get a shock, and he knows it's painful enough to not be worth it.

The lesson that Putin is learning is that Russia depends on the global economy, whether it likes it or not, and the global economy doesn't like it when you go invading other countries and tempting the richest nations in the world to maybe consider sanctioning you. This is actually a significant change for Russia, which at the height of its Soviet power was not integrated into the global economy and so didn't have to worry about things like investor sentiment. But now it is and it does.

What's cool about this is that it theoretically could apply to lots of other possible acts of international aggression around the world.This is something that economists and political scientists have been predicting since World War One: that integrating all the national economies into the global economy wouldn't just make all of us richer; it would make war more economically painful for the people starting it and thus less likely to happen.

It's not just the economy, though. As part of its strategy for fomenting chaos in eastern Ukraine and maybe possibly invading, Russia appears to have sponsored the pro-Russian separatist militias that seized government centers and engaged in firefights with Ukrainian troops. The separatists were good for Putin precisely because they're young, heavily armed zealots.

But they're maybe a bit too zealous, as Putin appears to be losing control of them. When they announced they would hold a highly dubious referendum on splitting from Ukraine to join Russia, Putin publicly urged them not to, and said nothing when they proceeded anyway. If Putin tries to deescalate the crisis, it's not clear that the separatists will listen to him, and he may end up on the hook for his previously useful wackos.

There is a big caveat here: Crimea. Russia controls Crimea and there just does not appear to be much the world can do about that. Obama, in comments in March, more or less admitted as much: "The facts on the ground are that the Russian military controls Crimea. There are a number of individuals inside of Crimea that are supportive of that process. There's no expectation that they will be dislodged by force," he said. "It would be dishonest to suggest that there's a simple solution to resolving what has already taken place in Crimea."

Still, in eastern Ukraine, there is pretty strong evidence that the system worked. Russia pushed too far, the US and Europe pushed back with sanctions not tough enough to hurt Russia on their own but tough enough to freak out global investors, and Putin was chastened by the economic damage that he mostly did to himself. The global economic integration that was supposed to prevent war actually did.

Summers: Piketty is right about the past, but the future is ours

I'm tired so I'm not going to analyze now in depth Larry Summers' analysis of Piketty's seminal, once-in-a-generation economic treatise, I'm just gonna say what Summers says Piketty's data should lead us to believe [emphasis mine]:

Perhaps the best way of thinking about Piketty’s wealth tax is less as a serious proposal than as a device for pointing up two truths. First, success in combating inequality will require addressing the myriad devices that enable those with great wealth to avoid paying income and estate taxes. It is sobering to contemplate that in the United States, annual estate and gift tax revenues come to less than 1 percent of the wealth of just the 400 wealthiest Americans. With respect to taxation, as so much else in life, the real scandal is not the illegal things people do—it is the things that are legal. And second, such efforts are likely to require international cooperation if they are to be effective in a world where capital is ever more mobile. The G-20 nations working through the OECD have begun to address these issues, but there is much more that can be done. Whatever one’s views on capital mobility generally, there should be a consensus on much more vigorous cooperative efforts to go after its dark side—tax havens, bank secrecy, money laundering, and regulatory arbitrage.

Beyond taxation, however, there is, one would hope, more than Piketty acknowledges that can be done to make it easier to raise middle-class incomes and to make it more difficult to accumulate great fortunes without requiring great social contributions in return. Examples include more vigorous enforcement of antimonopoly laws, reductions in excessive protection for intellectual property in cases where incentive effects are small and monopoly rents are high, greater encouragement of profit-sharing schemes that benefit workers and give them a stake in wealth accumulation, increased investment of government pension resources in riskier high-return assets, strengthening of collective bargaining arrangements, and improvements in corporate governance. Probably the two most important steps that public policy can take with respect to wealth inequality are the strengthening of financial regulation to more fully eliminate implicit and explicit subsidies to financial activity, and an easing of land-use restrictions that cause the real estate of the rich in major metropolitan areas to keep rising in value.

I'm no fan of Summers, yet his last two prescriptions are, I daresay, things you will never hear discussed in depth on Fox, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN or elsewhere. Wherefore the lib'rul media, indeed!

The only thing I will criticize now, is Summers' argument that "productivity" and "entrepreneurship" explain the outsized gains of U.S. managers. A look at average CEO pay among U.S. corporations and others gives the lie to this argument.  Nobody is arguing that U.S. CEOs are that much better, yet they earn orders of magnitude more than their workers.

As wonkish and un-sexy as it may be, I've talked about this before and will continue to talk about the OECD's effort to fight BEPS (tax base erosion and profit shifting) among global corporations. This is indeed a global problem, not just a U.S. problem, and the U.S. cannot hope to solve it in isolation, but must nevertheless play a leading role in ending this global "race to the bottom."

Thomas Piketty Is Right About the Past and Wrong About the Future

By Lawrence Summers

May 16, 2014 | The Atlantic

URL: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/thomas-piketty-is-right-about-the-past-and-wrong-about-the-future/370994/